Reflections

Dad wanted to play sports in school but couldn’t because he was needed to work. He left high school before graduating to join the U.S. Army at age 17. The Army was a good fit for him and provided the first new suit of clothing and shoes he had ever worn in his life.

I can’t recall one of my birthdays that Aunt Nellie didn’t swoop in sometime during the day with an impossibly magnificent cake at which everyone would “ooh and aaah” — both when presented in all its beauty and later when the tribe fell on the offering like a bunch of starving seagulls.

Dad was a larger-than-life figure that I idolized. But I tended to shrink from life. As a kid I imagined he would have made a better father for my more athletic, outgoing friends. He didn’t have much patience, and I was a quirky kid, who required patience.

Death is a taboo subject in our Western society. A typical lifetime begins with the joy of childhood then the zest of youth, love, adventure and then hopefully happiness and success. Even as we age, we never want it to end.

Because of his third-shift job at a textile mill, Dad couldn’t make it to most of my varsity basketball games. But the first thing he did when he got home in the morning was check the sports page to see how many points I scored. If I wasn’t in double figures he wasn’t happy.

That’s what men of his generation did. When there was a job to do, they did it their best, even if it meant driving a tank like a tractor through heavy enemy fire. Like so many of his fellow soldiers, he risked his life for his country, multiple times, because the job was there and someone had to do it.

Our prime-of-life plan is to be invisibly loud, robustly quiet, stealthily annoying and unconventional. We have agreed to relish not being the target audience for rejuvenating skin care regimes, new and improved hair care products, romantic novels, or ballads sung by boy bands.

I have been accused of being able to take almost any subject and twist it around to find a Titanic connection. I think that’s nonsense, personally, but let me tell you what the Titanic and cell phones have in common.